Ascend to dissent

No good argument can ever be brewed in the tankard of intellectual brooding unless it comes with dissent. And while I generally don’t feel that a blog format is perfect for re-litigating my brain farts, I don’t mind providing a counter argument.

So I found a comment to a previous post about making the Mimic hunt permanent, one that this blog format had to make me approve. One of the reason why it didn’t show up right away

I don’t like the mimic event. There are several problems with it:
1. It’s not standalone.
All events we had so far, take place in dedicated area (cove, mabar) or in modified public area (risia, midwinter, mabar).
Look at the laggy but purpose crafted summoning chamber of mabar, and a cute dragon. What new content does mimic event bring? No area, not even new monsters!
Mimic hunt takes place everywhere, and you can’t opt out of it (even if you do, someone in your party may not, leading to angst moments).

I can understand that one feature of the opt out, is the fact that other party members will still automatically opt you in. I don’t think there’s a good way around it to be honest. It’s one small issue with what otherwise makes this entirely optional. Unlike ‘champions’ that are either a question of running everything on casual or normal or having to ‘suffer them’. In that respect I think Mimics are perfect (even with that small flaw). You can ‘turn it off’ or you can leave it on.

2. Unpredictable rewards, lot of grind.
I may have been spoiled by mabar, where you could get a +5 tome by spending ~1h for 3 evenings. But in most events the rewards are pretty predicatble – you are guaranted to get from x to y ingredients per hour, that you can turn into useful stuff. In mimic hunt, you have random chance to spawn mimic from chest, then random chance to get an useful card, and given the amount of combinations you are only guaranted to spend several days to ever see the cards IX and X.
As a bonus, you will get a ton of cards that combine into lv 4 docent, that of course you can’t use on you lv 28 human cleric. Anniversary cards at least had useful stuff from any combination.

I agree. I find the turn in motes for random cards overly complicated and quite frankly nonsensical. It’s one thing to have a daily roll of ‘cards’ like in the previous anniversary but to have another form of collection, motes, and THEN turn in for cards just feels silly. That’s way too much grind. Note – I never turned anything in. Other then maybe picking up another tome I didn’t feel that I needed anything from the list of items that I hadn’t already created during the Mabar events and 1 potion for having to collect that many motes and pull the correct cards is just pure nonsense. But my suggestion of making it permanent is not to continue collecting motes for those rewards. I want to remove the cards entirely and I don’t want those items either.

No my idea is to lower proc chance for Mimic, still collect mote and turn in mote over time for interesting rewards. And idea I had was to after collecting 1000 motes you can pick to randomly get an item or shard form any of the old and now non playing raids. Meaning lets say you have 5 choices. Sands, Cannith Manufactury, CITW etc. after 1000 motes you turn them in for one choice. The list should be concentrated in such a way that you at least have a chance to get something okay. So for Sands that would be items or Epic shards, so that you can finally make that one rare item you always wanted. For Cannith it can be items or spirits – making it possible to upgrade your item. For CITW items or comms.

Now that’s just an idea. There can be other choices too, but the idea is to add a longterm goal for a ‘nice’ reward just for including the Mimic encounter to your game play. But no, I don’t want cards and I don’t want old Mabar loot. That’s just not enticing. Plus I do want there to be some kind of overlevel flag. This shouldn’t become a gimmick of level 28 chars doing level 4 quests over and over. That to me defeats the purpose.

3. Mimics are annoying to low level/unprepared.
It’s not funny when you finally finish the boss, having 5 hp left, then open a chest, that turns into mimic who hits you with slowdown and acid burn effect stronger than in quests 10 levels higher.

I agree. The good is that you can opt out. But this should be reserved for a slightly higher level quests, maybe level 7 and above where hirelings or such have at least Resurrection. And maybe not for endchests. I’m all for reasonable balance in everything and I don’t think that acid spewing Mimics are suitable for low level toons. And why I’m against champions on low levels. I’d say the first 10. We want people to get a slow but steady introduction to DDO and not just ambush them with burger king crowned spiders and rats and acid spewing chests.